MariaEmmaGalba

The question of the decorative long troubled abstraction, whether by embracing it or by attempting to avoid it altogether. With Maria Emma Galba, one could simply speak of expressive painting—of a body of work that comments on the veracity of the brushstroke as the mark of the artist herself. Her singular pictorial language establishes a synchrony between the artist’s gesture and the reading of the work.

The viewer is carried along in a single time frame, in the present moment, by the movement of forms and colors. And what do they reveal, if not the mobility of the artist’s body: the action of the wrist, then the sweep of the arm and shoulder, followed by the dynamism of the torso and legs, and finally the incessant back-and-forth movements in front of and around the painting to verify the accuracy of the line, the plane of color, the drip.

In Maria’s painting there is never a temptation toward erasure, toward a painting without her or without subject. She is there, inhabiting the canvas—even the smallest ones—nestled tightly within the more intimate formats, fully extended across the largest.

Throughout her body of work, this sensation of gesturality never recedes, most often controlled, yet never mechanical. Even in portraits or in paintings with repetitive motifs, one perceives the spirituality of an organic abstraction, a seriousness and concentration on spirit and image that are also present in the monochrome paintings.

Excerpt from a text by Christian Pallatier, 2022

Gallery EPONYME, Bordeaux France